‘When I wanted my lettuce-seed to come up I would perform little acts of propitiatory contrition to Pouchée, the poor old Pouchée who lives in Cambridge now. When grandpapa went out shooting I carried his game-bag, and used to offer fervent prayers, whenever the dogs came to a point, that he might kill his bird. Facts undermined my faith. Sometimes the point was false. Sometimes grandpapa missed his aim. Chaffinches and slugs ate my lettuce-seed. I turned infidel. I have remained one. Grandpapa says I have the hardest flint soul in, or out of, Christendom. Still, that is one Bartrand judging of another.’ ‘I am not a Bartrand,’ remarked Geff Arbuthnot. ‘I do not think you have a hard flint soul. You believe in wishes addressed to a strip of new moon, for instance?’ They were standing at the highest point of Tintajeux; a small plateau, the approach to which was fashioned on the exploded system of puzzle or maze. Long before Marjorie’s lifetime this plateau--who shall say on what morning of youthful human hope--had been christened Arcadia! The country-folk around Tintajeux called it Arcadia still. Cool draughts of air were stirring from the moorland. They brought fragrance of distant hayfields, honeyed whiffs of the syringa hedges that formed the maze. Would Marjorie ever curtsey to future moons without the scent of hay, the over-sweetness of blown syringa returning on her senses? ‘Some day,’ observed Geff, as she maintained a caustic silence, ‘I mean you to tell me what you wished for, a quarter of an hour ago, under the cedars.’ Marjorie Bartrand turned from him, the determination of a long lineage of dead, high-tempered Bartrands on her face. To command, implied or spoken, had she never yet bowed, during her seventeen years of life, without asking the reason why. She asked nothing now. Her cheeks--happily, the starlight betrayed no secrets--were glowing damask. For the girl knew, deep in her fiery heart, what the wish was; a wish by no means unconnected with her feelings towards Geoffrey Arbuthnot. CHAPTER VII ON THE BRINK OF A FLIRTATION Meanwhile the solstice night grew at each instant more purple, more mysterious. Geff felt himself in love with midsummer starlight, with Guernsey, with Tintajeux. Marjorie he would fain have engaged for a game of hide-and-seek among the neighbouring orchards, or of follow-my-leader along the beach, white in the crescent moon’s shining. For what was this poor small heiress but a child, with a child’s cold, sweet, unopened heart, a child’s quick temper, a child’s readiness for play, in whatever shape play might happen to be offered her! ‘You will not tell me your wish to-night, Miss Bartrand. Never mind. You will tell it me some day. To show you I bear no malice, you shall hear mine. My present wish, as I must leave Tintajeux, is to return to Miller’s Hotel by the longest road possible. You could point it out to me?’